The path led Joe away from the City Without Shadows, its memories settling into him like quiet embers. He followed the gray-blue stone road until it vanished into the shifting grass of a scarlet plain. The air here was heavier, as though thick with unspoken truths.
Ahead, the landscape changed. The plain ended in a wide plateau carved from black basalt, veins of glowing red running through it like blood under skin. In the center stood a circle of stone monoliths. Each bore runes etched in fire. The monoliths pulsed faintly, as though they were breathing.
Joe stepped into the circle.
The heat didn't burn. It revealed.
A pulse from his chest—the flame mark—lit the runes, and the monoliths began to whisper.
They spoke his story back to him.
Each word etched itself into the air in burning script: his fears, his mistakes, the moments he chose to stand. The time he ran. The time he returned.
Joe stood silently, listening to the fire write his life. He saw his shame reflected, heard laughter he thought he'd buried forever. In the script, he even saw his sister's name loop once, then vanish—as if it still waited for something to resolve.
Then the circle dimmed.
One last monolith remained dark.
He stepped toward it.
"This one is not your past," a voice said.
A woman stood beside it—tall, armor woven from starlight and iron. Her eyes were pure flame. "This one is your oath. It must be written in flame that does not burn."
Joe stared at the stone.
"What do I write?"
"Not what you are, Veilborn," she said. "What you will never become."
Joe studied her, truly looked. She wasn't merely a sentinel. The flame that burned in her was older than the Spiral. Her armor bore symbols from the gate of names, the same ones that tried to steal pieces of his memory. Her hair glowed with the light of dying stars.
"Who are you really?" Joe asked.
"I am what remains when the last oath-keeper falls," she replied softly. "I've waited here through a thousand awakenings. You are the first to come this far."
Joe looked at his hand. All seven eyes were closed now, not dormant, but resting.
He thought of the reflections he'd shattered. The paths he didn't take. The part of him that had begged to forget. He thought of the Spiral. The memory city. Emberwake. The Archivist. Every step that brought him here, wrapped in fire and silence.
He reached out.
Flame poured from his palm.
He wrote:
"I will never be unbroken."
The monolith flared.
But instead of merely glowing, it responded. A halo of flame burst upward, and Joe saw—just for a second—the shadows of others who had once stood where he stood. All of them choosing something. All of them changed.
The flame woman stepped back and bowed. "Then you are ready."
The basalt beneath his feet cracked open.
From it rose a stairway of brass, leading down into a chasm of shifting firelight and wind. The air smelled of old paper and molten iron. Heat rose from below, not threatening, but steady—like the breath of a great forge.
"Where does it lead?" he asked.
"To your first beginning," she said. "And your last test."
Joe hesitated.
"What if I fail?"
The woman's flame flickered, then steadied. "Then the fire remembers you. And the world waits for another."
Joe took the first step down.
He didn't look back.
The flame did not consume him.
It carried him forward.
End of Chapter 13.